How many insurgents did US Marines kill in the Marja invasion? No one knows, it’s classified. But every friendly fire incident or errant Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone will be reported with excruciating precision.

The primary thing we stand to lose is national prestige, and every friendly fire incident and civilian death chips away at American hegemony. If we win, well shouldn’t a superpower beat a group of illiterate, rag-tag geurillas? If we lose–perish the thought–every backwater despot will want a chance to strut his stuff on the world’s stage.

We should make public enemy body counts. Since Vietnam, the United States has made it policy that it not release body count numbers. As General Tommy Franks stated: “We don’t do body counts.”

I believe it’s time we did release body counts. Americans need to see why our Soldiers are dying, even if it’s only to show that we’re at least making others pay for killing us. Moreover, America needs to show who is actually killing the most civilians. In Iraq for instance, al-Qaeda killed civilians by the thousands, every year of the war. And yet we allowed some in the media and many activists to run with the numbers when it came to civilian deaths. They spun the story to read that America actually killed those innocents. America’s fault was that of failing to exert enough power, not of exerting too much power. And for that catastrophic mistake, we reaped the whirlwind. We tried a quarterback kneel with more than two minutes left in the game, then fumbled and watched our opponent run the ball back for a TD to tie the game. Slapped awake, we sent thousands more troops in clamped down on lawlessness, something we would have done as second nature fifty years prior.

There is of course, no option but victory. The resentful leftists who hoped America would fail in both Afghanistan and Iraq have been discredited. The best way to silence any criticism is to win. Please see how the citizens of Paris reacted when the Nazi goose-stepped through the Arc de Triomphe.